Hi. I am on a bit of a (student) budget but think I cam build a PC for video editing without breaking the bank. The 'AMD FX-6100 AM3+ 3.3GHz 14MB 95W' seems very good value and is 6 core. There seem to be various bundles for around 200 pounds (I am in UK).

The Motherboards the bundles come with are Asus M5A78L-M, Asus M5A97 PRO S/L and GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3. Not sure of the relative merits but like that they all have 2 full sized card slots.

The other question is what is a good CUDA graphics card that wont bread the bank.

Complete waste of money. AMD is absolutely crap in comparison to Intel. If you want to invest in a system that is slower than molasses in winter, go ahead. If you want a budget system, look here: Adobe Forums: What PC to build? An update...

OK, just to clarify are you saying at the lower end of the budget Intel give you more bang for your buck than AMD. It used to be the case that Intel produced the most powerful top end stuff but were more expensive so if you were going for a non top end computer AMD were a good option.

OK, just to clarify are you saying at the lower end of the budget Intel give you more bang for your buck than AMD. It used to be the case that Intel produced the most powerful top end stuff but were more expensive so if you were going for a non top end computer AMD were a good option.

Ben

Not these days, I'm afraid. Looking at the PPBM5 results list (using Premiere Pro CS5.5), the fastest FX-8150 system ranked only 437th out of the current 868 systems - and that particular FX-8150 was overclocked to 4.1GHz, to boot. At stock speed, the FX-8150 is even slower, ranking 533rd out of 868 systems. That's only slightly faster than a lowly dual-core i3-2100 Sandy Bridge system, which can't be overclocked at all and ranked 551st out of 868. So, if the FX-8150 performs this slowly, the FX-6100 is even slower than that - in fact, slower than any Sandy Bridge desktop i3 except for the handicapped low-power variants. Thus, the fastest AMD CPU is a total waste of money, slower than any Sandy Bridge quad-core i5 including some of the handicapped lower-power variants of the i5.

And although all of the FX series CPUs have multiple cores (the FX-8150 technically has eight cores, while the FX-6100 technically has six cores), the cores are grouped in units with two cores each - and the two cores in the same unit do not operate independently of one another (meaning that the two cores in the group are permanently tied together), effectively making that FX-8150 only a quad-core CPU with "hyperthreading". Thus, "six cores" when describing the FX-6100 is technically correct, but the way it works effectively makes it only a tri-core CPU with "hyperthreading".

The article is kind of old, it does not take into account of CS6 and Ivy Bridge.

That article is still relevant even now. Relative performance between different CPUs still holds true even in CS6. And Ivy Bridge is only about 5% faster than Sandy Bridge - in fact, it is still handicapped by the lack of a sufficient number of total PCI-e lanes from the CPU (only 16 total), plus whatever few PCI-e 2.0 lanes on the chipset's PCH that are used for onboard, PCI-e x1 and x4 slots.

That's better, but you're still going to be handicapped by a motherboard that does not take full advantage of that K-series CPU. The motherboard that you selected, IIRC, does not allow manual setting of the CPU voltages. The manual voltage settings can - and do - help in achieving a stable high overclock. With the CPU voltages permanently fixed on AUTO, that motherboard will effectively limit your maximum stable overclock on even the K-series CPU to about 3.8GHz - the same as with a non-K version of that same CPU.

Worse, the motherboard that you selected lacks both USB 3.0 and eSATA capability (in fact, all of the USB ports on that motherboard are only USB 2.0), so that transfers between the PC and any external hard drives will be molasses slow. This is partly because the Z68 chipset still lacks native USB 3.0 support, and because Gigabyte decided to cut costs on this particular mobo by not including an onboard USB 3.0 controller chip at all whatsoever. The new Z77 chipset now has native USB 3.0 support for up to four such ports in addition to the eight or so USB 2.0 ports that the Z77 supports.

Thanks for your reply. I was not thinking of overlooking. Is it standard practice? General I do not because I hate noisy computers so I install a quiet fan. That is one of the things I like about macs. They are very quiet.

Found a couple of alternatives but cant work out how to tell if they arow voltages to be set in the way you talk about.

If you are happy with a sustained transfer rate of around 50 MB/s, that FW800 connection is OK, but for serious work you need something like 300+ MB/s. Raid10 is not doing anything for you in terms of performance, only in terms of cost.